Wiley 978-1-1180-2446-1 Datasheet

Brand: Wiley

Model: 978-1-1180-2446-1

Category: Software manuals

Type: Datasheet

Chapter 1

Why Switch? Demystifying

the Mac Mantra

In This Chapter

▶ Why switch?

▶ Overcoming objections

▶ Advantage Apple

▶ It’s okay to switch

pple Macintosh computers aren’t perfect. They can’t cure bad breath,

save your marriage, or fix a bad hair day. Talk to enough Mac owners,

and you’ll find one who thinks he got a lemon and wasn’t satisfied with

Apple’s service. You can probably find a cheaper computer that will do

what you really need. The majority of computer users get by using Microsoft

Windows, and you can, too.

So why even think about switching? Macs offer a far better experience, that’s

why. Value matters in tight economic times. In big ways, such as security and

industrial design, and in countless little details, Apple makes the extra effort

to get things right — right for the user, not for some corporate purchas-

ing department. For those of us who spend a good part of our lives in front

of a video display, those easier-to-use controls, well-thought-out software

choices, and better hardware fit and finish all add up to create a tool that lets

us do what we want and doesn’t get in our way. For more casual users, the

simpler Mac design means less head-scratching while you figure out how to

perform that task.

Life is too short for Windows aggravation. Computers are now integral parts

of our lives: We use them for work, for play, and for communication; we use

them to find mates, to shop, to express ourselves, to educate our children,

and to manage our money. They help us fix our homes, cure our diseases,

and make new friends. No one has time to fuss over them, fix crashes, fight

viruses, clean out hard drives, figure out why the printer won’t work, reload

the software, or press Ctrl+Alt+Delete. We need computers to be there when

we want them. For the most part, Macs are there when we need them. Macs

just work.

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL

Part I: Informed Switching Starts Here

Microsoft isn’t run by a bunch of idiots. The company is managed by some

very smart people, and it hires top-notch engineers. Just getting a product as

complex as Windows out the door takes extraordinary talent. But Windows is

designed for corporations. A Microsoft engineer revealed in his blog that one

of the company’s corporate users had 9,000 programs for Windows. The user

simply couldn’t afford to update them for new releases. Microsoft Windows

has to support all the old software that’s out there. Apple is better able to let

go of the past and therefore is more nimble in developing new ways to make

your life easier.

Apple sees its mission as harnessing the rapid advances in computing

hardware to create revolutionary new products that improve our lives. The

Macintosh, the iPad, and the iPhone are all filled with groundbreaking innova-

tions. They’re cool to look at and to own. Why buy boring?

Taking Your Best Shot

The question of which is a better personal computer — a Macintosh or a

Windows PC — provokes passion matched by few other controversies. Were

the world less civilized, Apple fans would long since have been burned at

the stake by the more numerous Windows users who are fed up with hearing

how great Macs are. Instead, the debate rages over claims that Macs aren’t

suitable choices because they’re too this or can’t do that. The following sec-

tions outline the principal objections.

Steve Jobs’ other company

Steve Jobs helped found Apple and is widely

credited with creating the company culture of

excellence. For ten years, Jobs moonlighted in

another job: running Pixar Animation, now part

of Disney. There have been many movie studios

in the history of film, but few have produced ten

smash hits in a row: Toy Story; Toy Story 2; Toy

Story 3; A Bug’s Life; Monsters, Inc.; Finding

Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; Ratatouille; and

Wall-E. All were critically acclaimed box-office

successes that made extensive use of the very

latest in computer animation technology. But

the key to their popularity was subordinating

the gee-whiz special effects to the telling of a

compelling story. Want to know what makes

Macs different? Rent one of these movies.

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Chapter 1: Why Switch? Demystifying the Mac Mantra

“Macs are too expensive”

These days, every dollar counts. At this writing, you can buy a new Windows

computer for as little as $300. Netbooks sell for even less. But a cheap prod-

uct that causes you daily aggravation — and has to be replaced in a couple

of years — is no bargain. When you price configurations from quality manu-

facturers that match the standard features on a Mac, the difference in price

drops and often disappears. In the United States, you can buy a complete and

very usable Mac desktop setup for less than $600 (assuming that you already

own a suitable display, keyboard, and mouse), and you can buy an ultralight

MacBook Air laptop for less than $1,000. If those prices are too much for your

budget, see the tips in Chapter 3 for getting a Mac for less.

The arguments for buying a Mac are based on quality and total cost of owner-

ship, not on initial purchase price. PCs have hidden costs, such as virus-pro-

tection software and periodic disk rebuilding, and they generally are replaced

more often than Macs are. Few people boast about how cheap their car is or

how little they spent for their home entertainment center. Quality matters,

and when cash is scarce, quality matters even more.

“Switching is too hard”

I’m not saying that switching from a Windows PC to a Mac is painless. If

you’ve been using Windows for a while, you’re used to its idiosyncrasies.

You made a big investment in learning how to use all that Windows software,

not to mention the amount you paid for it. You may find some aspects of the

Mac hard to get used to, though I guide you through them all in Chapter 4.

But on the whole, switching isn’t that bad. Macs and Windows PCs have more

commonalities than they have differences. And Apple has new tools to make

switching even easier, including a Windows Migration Assistant, described in

Chapter 6, and an optional One-to-One program at the Apple store that does

the file transfer work for you. All in all, I think that you’ll find a switch easy

enough and worth the effort.

“I’ll be left with no software”

Many Windows advocates claim that less software is available for the

Macintosh. The standard smart-aleck Mac-user answer is “Yeah, we really

miss all those viruses and spyware programs.” But some truth to this objec-

tion exists. Certain highly specialized programs run only in Windows. Where

equivalents exist for the Mac, you may have fewer choices.

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Part I: Informed Switching Starts Here

On the other hand, thousands of software titles are available for the Mac, and

they cover the needs of most users quite well. In fact, some great software is

available only for the Mac. Every new Mac comes with the following:

✓ Apple applications: These applications handle your e-mail, instant

messaging, address book, calendar, and (of course) iTunes.

✓ The Apple iLife suite: This collection of programs lets you manage

photos, make movies, authoring DVDs, create websites, and compose

your own music. It even teaches you how to play an instrument.

✓ The Mac App Store: An easier way to buy quality, inexpensive software.

Pioneered for the iPhone. It attracts an army of developers, big and small.

✓ A built-in camera and powerful FaceTime videoconferencing software:

All new Macs (laptops and iMac desktops) that have a built-in display

have the camera, and the software works with industry standards.

Some longtime Windows-only software is now available for the Mac, as

developers have realized that they were missing an important market. One

example is AutoCAD, widely used by architects and mechanical designers.

Another is the popular QuickBooks accounting system for small business,

though it lacks some features of the Windows version. Moreover, the Mac OS

X operating system is built on top of Unix, and Apple follows the Single Unix

Specification (SUS). Therefore, a large amount of software developed for Unix

and Linux operating systems can run on your Mac, including many popular,

free open-source packages. Much of that software doesn’t run in Windows.

Finally, Macs can also run Windows, so you can still run the odd program

for which an equivalent isn’t available on the Mac. All new Macs run on Intel

microprocessors — the same ones that power most Windows machines. In

fact, any Mac sold since mid-2005 is also a full-fledged, strictly kosher PC,

one that can run the Windows 7 operating systems as well as any PC on the

market. So if you must run software that’s available only for Windows, you

can use it on a Mac, too. Yeah, you have to buy and install Windows sepa-

rately, but I walk you through that task in Chapter 16.

“Macs are dying out”

Macs were close to dying out in the 1990s. Their share of the personal com-

puter market was less than 3 percent. That share has been climbing steadily,

however, and at last report was 15 percent in the United States. Market share

doesn’t tell the whole story, however. Apple commands some 35 percent of

all profits made from selling personal computers. Its competitors are locked

in a death spiral, competing on price and doing everything they can to shave

costs at the expense of quality. The success of the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod,

and the iTunes Store makes more PC users consider Apple. More than half

of all new Macs are purchased by people who were using Windows, and

40 percent of college students buy Macs.

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Chapter 1: Why Switch? Demystifying the Mac Mantra

“Macs are not expandable”

Since the earliest days of the IBM Personal Computer, PCs have come in big

boxes that a user could open to install expansion cards or to add memory

and hard drives. Steve Jobs horrified the techie end of the PC world when he

built the original Macintosh as a self-contained unit that users weren’t sup-

posed to open. Although Apple offers a model with expansion slots (the top-

of-the-line Mac Pro), and although memory slots on current Macs are easy to

access, Apple encourages expansion by hooking up accessories with easier-

to-use high-speed cabling. Apple invented FireWire, a blazingly fast expansion

port that lets users attach high-performance devices without opening the

box. The PC world responded by developing its own fast expansion port,

USB 2.0, which Apple then adopted.

Now Apple and Intel have jointly developed an even faster way to hook

up accessories: Thunderbolt. (It’s not easy to top a name like FireWire.)

Thunderbolt packages on a wire the same PCI Express technology used in

modern PC expansion slots. It’s a game changer, with speeds up to 20 times

faster than USB 2.0 and 12 times faster than FireWire 800. You can connect

more than one device to a Thunderbolt port, and it even doubles as a Mini

DisplayPort so that you can hook a large video display to the end of that

Thunderbolt daisy chain.

All new Macs offer Thunderbolt and USB 2.0 ports, and many include a

FireWire port, allowing a wide range of accessories to be attached just by plug-

ging them in.

See Chapter 2 for an introduction to the Mac models now available.

“Macs don’t comply with

industry standards”

Early in Apple’s history, Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple and its engi-

neering genius, came up with a clever way to squeeze more bits onto a floppy

disk (an early form of portable data storage). Unfortunately, this design made

floppy disks written on early Macs unreadable on IBM PCs. That gave Apple

a reputation of being an odd duck from a standards standpoint. Apple has

never been able to shake that reputation completely, even though it later

added PC-compatible floppy drives and is now exemplary in sticking to indus-

try standards. Indeed, Apple was the first to popularize now-ubiquitous com-

puter industry standards such as Wi-Fi wireless networking and the Universal

Serial Bus (USB). Other standards gobbledygook that Macs support include

Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, IEEE-1394 FireWire, PCI Express, Thunderbolt

(see Chapter 3 for more details), and the Intel microprocessor architecture.

The Apple web browser, Safari (also available for Windows), carefully follows

the latest HTML5 Internet standards — more so than Microsoft’s Internet

Explorer does.

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Part I: Informed Switching Starts Here

“I need Windows for work”

So run Windows on your Mac. You have to buy a copy, which is an added

expense. But both operating systems run fine on a Mac, and you can still use

Mac OS X when you’re not working. Using third-party virtualization software,

you can run both operating systems at the same time, with Windows applica-

tions appearing on the Mac OS X desktop alongside native Mac applications. I

tell you more about how all this works in Chapter 16.

“Macs are a poor game platform”

True, more games exist for the PC, but plenty are available for Macs, including

top titles like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, StarCraft II, and Spore. Many more

are coming. Large game companies like Blizzard have committed to the Mac

platform, though many independents have not. The Apple iPad, iPhone, and

iPod touch have proved to be successful portable game platforms, attracting

new game developers to the Apple universe. All low-end Macs include inte-

grated graphics processors; the high-end Mac mini, all iMacs and the 15- and

17-inch MacBook Pro laptops add a second high-performance AMD Radeon HD

graphics chip; and the Mac Pro can be ordered with two top-of-the-line graph-

ics processors. Multicore main processors add more graphics performance,

and Lion’s OpenGL unlocks the power of these graphics devices for more com-

puting tasks. If you’re a serious gamer, you probably know all about the latest

graphics processors, but I tell you more about them in Chapter 2.

“Windows 8 will kill Apple”

Microsoft spent five years and billions of dollars developing the Vista operat-

ing system, in part to end the scourge of computer viruses and spyware that

have plagued the PC world for more than a decade. After Vista proved to be

Will Apple license OS X for other PCs?

A perennial question in the Apple-watching

community is whether Apple will license its OS

X operating system to run on other PCs. After

the Apple switch to Intel processors, there

remains no technical reason why this can’t be

done. Indeed, Apple has to go to some lengths

to discourage clever programmers from modify-

ing (hacking) OS X to run on personal computers

sold by other manufacturers. One scenario has

Apple mimicking the Microsoft strategy and

selling OS X to anyone to run on any computer

that meets minimal standards. Every indication

says that Apple will continue to try to keep OS

X to itself and follow its high-end branding strat-

egy, but Apple is known for creating surprises.

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Chapter 1: Why Switch? Demystifying the Mac Mantra

an embarrassment, Microsoft spent more years and more billions to rework it

into Windows 7. During the same period, Apple has been devoting its energy

to improving its OS X operating system from the user’s perspective. While

Windows 7 and Windows Vista were gestating, Apple released six improved

versions of OS X, code-named Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard,

and now Lion. (Someone at Apple likes big cats.) Perhaps Windows 8 will

close the gap. We’ll see.

Considering All Aspects —

Advantage Apple

Apple has adopted strategies that give it important advantages over the

competition provided by Microsoft. The following sections explore what you

need to know about each one.

One neck to wring

Microsoft sells its Windows operating system to dozens of companies that

make personal computers. This practice has benefits in that competition

among these PC vendors keeps prices down, but it also means that Microsoft

has to support a bewildering variety of hardware designs and components.

This support includes not just all the variations now being sold, but also

products that are no longer being sold but are still in use, including PCs

made by companies that have left the business. Outside a brief flirtation

with licensing in the mid-1990s, Apple has maintained complete control of

the design and manufacture of products that use its software. This vertical

integration greatly simplifies Apple’s development efforts, allowing it to bring

out new versions of its operating system much more often than Microsoft has

been able to.

Vertical integration also has benefits for customers in terms of reliability and

service. If you have a problem with hardware or software, Apple has a strong

incentive to fix it. With the computer, operating system, and much of the soft-

ware supplied by a single vendor, Mac users don’t have to worry about being

shuttled from company to company (“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to contact

Fly-by-Night Software to solve your movie-editing bug; it makes that applica-

tion”). Any problems with the extensive suite of software that comes with a

Mac are Apple’s problems. There’s only one neck to wring.

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Part I: Informed Switching Starts Here

Apple is the industry thought leader

Anyone who follows the high-tech industry is used to reading articles about

amazing new technologies that are going to revolutionize our lives — and

then never hearing about them again. One of Apple’s roles in the computer

industry is picking and choosing among those new ideas. For the most part,

technologies that Apple picks are adopted by the rest of the industry, par-

ticularly by Microsoft. Apple may not have invented the graphical user inter-

face, Wi-Fi wireless networking, USB, the smartphone, or tablets but Apple’s

adoption and careful implementation of these technologies made them indus-

try standards. Apple users get the good new stuff first.

Appearances matter

Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. Sometimes, function follows

form. Early in Apple’s history, Steve Jobs recognized that aesthetics matter.

The design team that created the first Macintosh computer included a fine

artist who was involved in everything from the design of the graphical inter-

face to the artwork on the cardboard box that the Mac came in. When Jobs

returned to Apple, he restored artistic quality to prominence at Apple. From

the original lollipop-colored iMacs to the latest iPad, Apple products have

won awards for excellence in industrial design. Figure 1-1 shows the elegant

current iMac all-in-one computer.

Quality industrial design means more than arranging all the buttons and jacks

in a pleasing way. It also means questioning each feature and eliminating

unnecessary doodads. The result is something that isn’t just easy to look at,

but also easy to understand and simple to work with.

Are Mac users too smug about viruses?

Computer-industry pundits are continually

warning Mac users that the pandemic of

viruses, worms, Trojans, and other malware

that plagues the PC world will soon be coming

to Macintosh users. They’ve been issuing these

warnings for more than a decade, as I remem-

ber, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be right

someday. The Mac market is no longer too

small for virus writers to bother with. On the

other hand, Apple has the resources, skills, and

commitment to try to keep ahead of the mal-

ware threat. OS X Lion introduces important

security improvements, and Apple issues regu-

lar security fixes through its Software Update

program. Good security practices still make

sense in the Mac world, and I tell you ways to

keep your Mac secure in Chapter 10.

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Chapter 1: Why Switch? Demystifying the Mac Mantra

Figure 1-1:

The iMac

offers

everything

you need in

one smart

package.

The Magic

Trackpad

shown here

is a handy

option.

Photo courtesy of Apple, Inc.

A case in point is the optional Apple Remote. Remotes for most consumer

products rival an airplane cockpit in complexity; the Apple version has just

six buttons.

Looking forward, not backward

Apple leadership in technology extends beyond picking winners. Apple

is also the company that decides when to tell a once-popular technology,

“You’re fired.” It was the first to introduce 3

⁄2-inch floppy disks on personal

computers and the first to drop their use as a standard feature. Other tech-

nologies that Apple was the first to drop include the RS-232 serial port and

the dialup modem. You can still find these features as external add-ons if you

really need them, but Apple realized that most of us no longer do. Letting

go of old technology wards off the feature bloat that plagues the computer

industry. Unneeded features increase complexity and make machines harder

to use and more prone to problems.

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Part I: Informed Switching Starts Here

Getting top-notch products

Apple makes money on the products it sells. Unit for unit, Apple is the most

profitable company in the industry. How does the company do that with such

a small share of the market? The same way that Mercedes-Benz or BMW or

Armani does: by branding. Apple doesn’t sell products that are interchange-

able with products sold by half a dozen other companies. It sells unique

products — products that are sufficiently superior that customers willingly

pay a bit more for them. The benefit to you, as a Mac buyer, is the simple

reality that no company can keep such an enviable position in the long run

without delivering top-notch goods. You do get what you pay for.

iPad, iPod, and iPhone

Apple’s runaway success with the iPod personal music player, introduced in

2001, has given the company the kind of market dominance in mobile com-

puting that Microsoft has enjoyed in the PC market.

The iPhone has been hailed as a revolution in personal communications.

It comes in two versions: a four-band phone that uses the worldwide GSM

standard, allowing its use anywhere, and a version compatible with the

Qualcomm standard used by Verizon in the U.S. Both versions include iPod

music, a pair of cameras, and video technology and direct Internet access via

Wi-Fi or cellular phone links. Apple includes a version of its operating system

called iOS in the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, with a well-integrated and

easy-to-use interface, all in spectacularly elegant packages.

Apple gives away a version of its iTunes music software that runs in

Windows. The company is betting that iPod, iPad, and iPhone customers

who use Windows will be impressed by iTunes’ ease of use and will give the

Macintosh a closer look when they’re ready to upgrade their computers. You

find out more about iTunes in Chapter 11.

Switching Sides Can Sting

The Mac-versus-PC debate ranks as one of the great divides in the modern

world. Just because these feelings are whipped up by marketing departments

doesn’t mean that they lack emotional impact. Your computer choice forms

part of your personal identity. Mac users have a reputation for a certain

smugness. (“You just got a virus? You mean, like a cold?”) Much of that atti-

tude is defensive, of course. It’s no fun being a minority in a PC-dominated

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Chapter 1: Why Switch? Demystifying the Mac Mantra

world. (“You bought a what? Are they still making those?”) Few other choices

we make in life can be as self-defining — perhaps religion, political party, and

sports team to cheer for. People who move from New York City to Boston, for

example, invariably suffer mental scars inflicted by changing their baseball

allegiance from the New York Yankees to the Boston Red Sox. (Some of them

never recover and have to live the rest of their lives eking out a living writing

books for technology novices.)

This kind of psychological trauma doesn’t have to happen to you just

because you switch computer platforms. Think of it this way: The PC won the

great war. Apple was forced to abandon the Motorola processor family and

convert to Intel. Macs are now just PCs in more stylish packages with better

software. You’re not abandoning your mother’s cooking — just sampling a

different cuisine.

No matter what I say, you probably won’t completely escape the emotional

side of switching to a Mac. When you feel the shame of betrayal and the

pangs of guilt coming on, repeat this mantra: “It’s just a computer. It’s just a

computer. It’s just a computer.”

An optional brief history of Apple

You don’t need to read this sidebar to make

your decisions, but no book on switching to

the Mac would be complete without a little his-

tory of how Apple got where it is today. None

of the science-fiction magazines that warped

our formative minds dared to predict the level

of computing power that we have beneath our

fingertips or in our shirt pockets today. Further,

no high-tech story is as compelling as the

legend of Steve and Bill, two kids from the West

Coast of the United States who revolutionized

the world.

Apple Computer was founded on April Fools’

Day, 1976, by three young men: Steve Jobs,

Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. Their

original mission: Sell low-cost circuit boards on

which hobbyists would build their own comput-

ers, based on the newly invented microproces-

sor. That mission quickly changed when Jobs

found that a local electronics shop wanted

more fully assembled systems and gave him an

order for several dozen of them. The price of

the first Apple product, the Apple I, was $666.66,

more than the price of today’s far more capable

Mac mini. Adjusted for inflation, the Apple I

would cost about $2,600 in 2011 dollars — more

than enough for a Mac Pro, or a top-of-the-line

27-inch iMac plus an iPad.

The Apple I used a 6502 microprocessor, which

was considered to be easier to program than

the early groundbreaking devices from Intel

and Zilog, and featured a BASIC interpreter.

BASIC is a particularly simple computer lan-

guage invented by Dartmouth professor John

Kemeny to help teach programming. A young

programmer named Bill Gates dropped out of

Harvard — horrifying his parents — to start

a business selling software to the fledgling

microcomputer industry. He chose the imagi-

native name Microsoft for his venture. A BASIC

(continued)

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Part I: Informed Switching Starts Here

(continued)

interpreter for microcomputers was the com-

pany’s first product, and Apple was among its

earliest customers. The choice of corporate

names was prophetic: a utilitarian contraction

versus a friendly fruit icon.

The Apple II quickly supplanted the primitive

Apple I and propelled Apple Computer to early

leadership in personal computing. Dan Bricklin

wrote VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet

program, for the Apple II. If you crunch num-

bers for a living, imagine what the world was

like when a spreadsheet was just a wide piece

of ruled paper on which calculations were

recorded one at a time by hand, and you can

appreciate the impact of VisiCalc.

Microsoft got its big break when International

Business Machines (IBM) decided to try its

hand at making a personal computer and

chose Gates’ company to supply the all-impor-

tant operating system. Although IBM is now a

well-respected name in computing, back in the

1970s, it pretty much owned commercial com-

puting. Almost every major corporation in the

world used IBM computers. Young computer

professionals were told by older hands that

no one was ever fired for buying IBM. Some

Apple IIs had made their way into the corpo-

rate world because of VisiCalc, but they were

soon replaced by beige boxes sporting IBM

logos, the Microsoft operating system named

DOS, and an even better spreadsheet program:

Lotus 1-2-3.

The Apple II was a hard act for Apple to follow.

Apple made two disastrous attempts: the Apple

III (a souped-up Apple II) and the Lisa. The Lisa

was a machine ahead of its time, pioneering the

use of a mouse to move a pointer on the screen

and letting users initiate actions by manipulat-

ing icons representing programs, data files, and

hard drives, for example. But this graphical user

interface couldn’t overcome a $10,000 starting

price, and few Lisas were sold.

Jobs, fed up with the increasingly corporatized

development environment at Apple, led a ren-

egade team to develop a more affordable com-

puter, based on much of the same technology

as Lisa. The new Macintosh was announced

during the 1984 Super Bowl in what is perhaps

the best television commercial ever made. You

can view it at www.uriahcarpenter.

info/1984.html.

Besides its mouse and graphical user inter-

face, the Macintosh was packaged as a single

unit with a built-in, high-resolution (for its time)

black-on-white screen that crisply displayed

the information that would eventually print

on paper. IBM PCs offered green letters on a

black background in just one font. The higher-

quality Mac display enabled a “what you see

is what you get” document-creation process

and started the desktop publishing revolution.

The Mac also introduced 3

⁄2-inch floppy disks,

and its Motorola 68000 microprocessor could

address more memory than the Intel 8088 in the

IBM PC, allowing the use of more sophisticated

programs.

Microsoft hedged its bets by developing soft-

ware applications for the new Mac, including

the word processing program named Word

and the spreadsheet named Multiplan. Jobs

and Gates personally negotiated a contract

that let Microsoft sell a simplified version of the

graphical interface named Microsoft Windows

1.0. When Microsoft later released a full-blown

graphical user interface in Windows 3.0, Apple

sued, but the courts ruled that it was covered by

that one-page contract. Word became the flag-

ship word processor for Windows, and Excel,

with a graphical interface like Multiplan’s,

drove out Lotus 1-2-3.

Jobs left Apple in 1985 after some disagree-

ments with the board of directors and started a

new computer company, NeXT. It built a graphi-

cal interface on top of an operating system

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Chapter 1: Why Switch? Demystifying the Mac Mantra

named Unix that was developed by the American

Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T).

Unix was popular with computer researchers

because of its flexible design and because a ver-

sion with source code was available.

Apple continued to introduce more powerful

versions of the Macintosh, adding hard drives,

laser printers, and high-resolution color dis-

plays. Its share of the personal computer market

continued to decline relative to IBM PCs and

their clones. In 1994, Apple switched from the

Motorola 68000 series microprocessor to the

PowerPC chip, jointly developed by Motorola,

IBM, and Apple. The PowerPC was designed

to allow programs to run faster than those run

by the Intel chips, but the theoretical advantage

never materialized as Intel chip engineers used

innovative techniques to keep up.

In 1997, Apple acquired NeXT, and Steve Jobs

rejoined the company, soon taking the helm. A

year later, he reinvigorated Apple sales with

the iMac, an all-in-one computer that echoed

the original Macintosh. A flat-panel version

appeared in 2002. Apple soon replaced its OS

9 operating system (the lineage of which goes

back to the first Macintosh) with a new system:

Mac OS X, based on the NeXT operating

system. The iPod was launched in 2001.

In 2005, Jobs ended the personal computer

microprocessor wars when he announced

that Apple would switch to x86 Intel micropro-

cessors, the same microprocessors used in

Windows PCs. All Macs manufactured since

2006 employ Intel microprocessors. In 2007,

Jobs introduced the Apple TV (ÚTV), extend-

ing the Apple brand to the living room, as well

as the spiffy iPhone, setting a new standard in

mobile communication. The companion iPod

touch shares many iPhone features except

the phone and has become a popular game

platform. In 2010, Apple introduced another

revolutionary product, the iPad, replacing it a

year later with the iPad 2. More than 425,000

inexpensive or free applications for the iPhone,

iPod touch, and iPad are available online at the

iTunes Store.

In 2010, Jobs announced that he was taking a

leave of absence from day-to-day Apple man-

agement for health reasons, though he was on

hand at Apple’s 2011 developer conference to

introduce OS X Lion. We wish him well.

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Part I: Informed Switching Starts Here

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